Peter Fitzpatrick

Politics, metaphysics, and death : essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo sacer

Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead / Andrew Norris 1 Au Hasard / Thomas Carl Wall 31 Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law / Peter Fitzpatrick S/Citing the Camp / Erik Vogt 74 The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp / Andreas Kalyvas 107 Anagrammatics of Violence: The Benjaminian Ground of Homo Sacer / Anselm Haverkamp 135 Spaceing as the Shared: Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben / Andrew Benjamin 145 Cutting the Branches of Akiba: Agambens Critique of Derrida / Adam Thurschwell 173 Linguistic Survival and Ethnicality: Biopolitics, Subjectivication, and Testimony in Remnants of Auschwitz / Catherine Mills 198 Supposing the Impossibility of Silence and of Sound, of Voice: Bataille, Agamben, and the Holocaust / Paul Hegarty 222 Law of Life / Rainer Maria Kiesow 248 The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer / Andrew Norris 262 The State of Exception / Giorgio Agamben 284 Contributors 299 Index 301

The Mythology of Modern Law.

Myth and the negation of law myth and modernity the mythic foundation of modern law the mythic consolidation of modern law law and myths law as myth.

‘Gods would be needed…’: American empire and the rule of (international) law

In the perennial debate over whether the dependence of international law on power is complete or whether international law maintains some independence for itself, the latter position is increasingly and at best marginal. Here that direction of the debate is reversed. The very dependence of international law on power is integral to a relation of mutual dependence between them. It is in this relation that power constituently depends on an international law which, in its turn, contains a primal efficacy. That efficacy is illustrated in its countering the claims of American empire.

‘The damned word’: culture and its (in)compatibility with law

The compatibility and incompatibility between law and culture are identified through an analysis of relation. By way of exploring the elusiveness of conceptions of culture and of law, a commonality relating them is arrived at, one that indicates not only what they constituently share but also what distinguishes them from each other. So far an abstract abstract. The abstractness of the comment itself is relieved by references to a case study and by resorting to etymologies.

‘No Higher Duty’: Mabo and the Failure of Legal Foundation

The first half of the paper shows how the imperial quality of the common law putatively accommodates the demand for legal foundation. The second half takes the Mabo decision as a test of this supposed ability and finds it foundationally wanting. The continuing insistence of the indigenous presence provides the key.

What Are the Gods to Us Now?: Secular Theology and the Modernity of Law

Integrating responses of Nietzsche to the death of God with classic instances of modernist political theory, a constituent parallel is drawn between monotheistic religion and modern law — a parallel in that each matches the other, but a parallel also in that neither ever meets the other. This relation yet differentiation reveals an ontologically challenging modern law that conforms to, yet completely counters, its positivist and instrumental subordinations in modernity.

Necessary fictions: indigenous claims and the humanity of rights

Indigenous right insistently challenges the surpassing arrogations of sovereign right. In so doing, it affirms dimensions of being‐together denied or stunted in sovereign modes of political formation. This force of Indigenous right is amplified here through legal and literary instantiations. These, in turn, uncover the continuously created and fictional quality of rights, revealing them to be necessary fictions.

Raíces latinas: teología secular y formación imperial occidental

Resumen es: Este articulo concierne el olvido de las formas deificas, o politico-teologicas, del imperialismo moderno. De manera particular, localiza el marco de dic...

Consolations of the Law: Jurisprudence and the Constitution of Deliberative Politics

Initially, deliberative politics offers a failure of self-identity in that the literature dealing with it divides between its determinate elevation in terms of reason, and such, and its dissipation in response to the diversity of interests pressing on it. Next, drawing on the resources of poststructural jurisprudence and by way of locating law at a defining limit of deliberative politics, a similar divide is found in law itself. Then, more productively, law is shown to be constituted with-in that divide and to take characteristic content from it. Finally, the analysis is returned to deliberative politics where the divide found in the literature can now be seen as offering this politics possibilities of effective constitution and distinctive content.